CoreWeave Revenue Doubles as AI Demand Fuels a $104 Billion Backlog

A Surprise Beat Sends Shares Soaring

CoreWeave stock rocketed as much as 20% higher in premarket trading after the AI cloud company reported revenue that doubled year over year. The results, released on August 11, quickly reshaped investor sentiment around a stock that had been under serious pressure. CoreWeave shares had plunged more than 30% since the company last reported results in May, amid concerns about revenue growth and its spending plans. Tuesday's numbers offered a convincing rebuttal to the skeptics.

CoreWeave posted earnings per share of a loss of $1.03 adjusted versus a loss of $1.20 expected, while revenue came in at $2.58 billion against the $2.56 billion Wall Street had anticipated. Revenue climbed 112% during the quarter from a year earlier. CEO Michael Intrator called it "an important inflection point," saying the company's scale was beginning to translate into expanding operating leverage and that customer demand is accelerating as enterprise adoption broadens.

Losses Widen, but Debt Is the Culprit

CoreWeave more than doubled its revenue from the $1.21 billion it recorded in the same period a year ago, but net losses widened to $626 million from $290 million a year earlier, driven in large part by a surge in interest costs. That nuance matters. The company isn't losing money because its business is struggling — it's losing money because it's borrowing aggressively to build out infrastructure at a historic pace.

Net interest expense reached $640 million in the quarter, more than double the $267 million recorded in Q2 2025. The company has taken on substantial debt to fund infrastructure expansion, raising more than $10 billion in unsecured debt and convertible bonds during the quarter. As of June 30, CoreWeave operated 51 active data centers, with total active power capacity of 1.5 gigawatts — adding nearly 500 megawatts in Q2 alone. That kind of physical expansion doesn't come cheap, and the company is clearly betting that locking in capacity now will pay off handsomely as AI demand accelerates.

A Backlog That Signals Long-Term Confidence

CoreWeave ended Q2 with a revenue backlog of $104 billion, up 246% year over year, and that figure excludes over $25 billion in net new customer commitments added early in Q3. These aren't soft expressions of interest — they're contracted commitments from some of the biggest names in tech. CoreWeave signed a $21 billion agreement to supply AI cloud capacity to Meta through 2032, layering on top of a prior $14 billion commitment, and separately reached a multi-year agreement with Anthropic to provide compute for its Claude AI models.

Adjusted EBITDA came in at $1.5 billion in Q2, doubling year over year with a margin of 59%, while adjusted operating income reached $128 million, up from just $21 million the prior quarter. Those are the kinds of margin trends that tell a story of a company maturing rapidly, even as it continues to spend at eye-watering levels.

What's Ahead for CoreWeave

For 2026, CoreWeave now sees $960 million to $1.15 billion in adjusted operating income on $12.4 billion to $13.2 billion in revenue. Management also raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $35 billion to $39 billion — up from prior guidance of $31 billion to $35 billion — and guided for active power capacity of over 1.85 gigawatts by year-end.

Among other milestones during the quarter, CoreWeave was added to the Nasdaq-100 Index and completed what it described as the first bring-up and validation of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 chip system. Contracted power capacity stands at approximately 3.7 gigawatts, part of a pipeline from which future data centers will be built toward the company's 8-gigawatt target by 2030. With a backlog that now stretches well past $100 billion and partnerships with the most powerful players in AI, CoreWeave is positioning itself not just as an infrastructure vendor, but as a foundational layer of the AI economy itself.